We are very proud to announce the publication of an article in Nature Climate Change co-written by MAEASaM’s own Dr Nadia Khalaf!
The paper concerns the threats of flooding and erosion faced by heritage sites on the African coast due to the world’s current climate emergency. The team mapped 284 coastal heritage sites and modelled how each would be exposed by possible future global warming.
MAEASaM researcher, Dr Nadia Khalaf, based at the University of Exeter, led this identification and mapping of Africa’s coastal heritage sites using remote sensing and GIS, creating a database of UNESCO World Heritage sites and Tentative World heritage sites, which was then used to model the exposure of sea level rise and erosion at site by the team’s climate scientists. Nadia used techniques employed on the MAEASaM project to accurately map the sites, including information from published legacy data and the use of very high-resolution satellite imagery supplied by Google Earth.
Dr Khalaf said: “Africa is at significant threat from the adverse effects of climate change, but how this will impact natural and cultural heritage is unknown. These sites have enormous economic, social, and ecological value for the people of Africa. Our research highlights the importance of multidisciplinary research across heritage and climate science and illustrates how the two can work in tandem to assess risks and mitigate loss and damage to African heritage.”
Several countries are projected to have every one of their coastal heritage sites exposed by the end of the 21st century: Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Western Sahara, Libya, Mozambique, Mauritania, and Namibia, and additionally Côte d’Ivoire, Cabo Verde, Sudan and Tanzania in the most extreme scenario.
This dire warning shows how vital adaptation and mitigation responses to climate change will be within the next century, in order to help protect such heritage sites. It also emphasises the importance of recording such sites and the threats they face, in order to know where such protection is required (as MAEASaM is aiming to undertake).
First image courtesy of MAEASaM’s Angela Kabiru, second image is a screenshot of the paper which can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01280-1 (Vousdoukas et al. 2022. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01280-1)